National life from the standpoint of science; an address delivered at Newcastle, November 19, 1900

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Kjatio

LIFE

.w.wl THE STAxXDPOINT OF

SCIENCE

KARL PEARSON

jpis^pencfr^lfroiiif

NATIONAL LIFE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE

Demy Svo.f Cloth, Price ^s, 6d, net

Second edition, thoroughly Revised and much Enlarged.
Contains two entirely New Chapters on Natural Selection
and Heredity, embracing a popular account of Prof.
Pearson's own more recent work in this direction. Con-
taining 33 Illustrations in the Text.

^ ' Not the least interestinjg; part of this powerful book is the discus-
sion of the effect on the mind of a true scientific education, which
enables a man or a woman to form judgments freed from individual
bias. . . . We recommend all readers, and especially scientists,
meUi>hyncians, theologians, and last, but not least, the writers of
scientific text-books, to read and digest this well-written, clearly
reasoned description of what science and scientific method is.'—
Pall Mall Gasette.

NATIONAL LIFE

FROM THE STANDPOINT OF
SCIENCE

an H^^re^s ^elfvere^ at Newcastle,
tiovmbct \9f 1900

BT

KARL P^EARSON, F.R.S.

Professor of Applied BIathematics, University College, London

LONDON

ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK

igoi

W. F. R. WELDON, F.R.S.,

Linacre Professor of Comparative Anatomy
in the University of Oxford,

A SLIGHT TOKEN OF GRATITUDE
FOR ALL THAT I HAVE LEARNT FROM HIM
DURING THE YEARS OF OUR FRIENDSHIP.

NOTE.

This address was delivered in Newcastle
on November 19, to the members of the
Literary and Philosophical Society, and the
substance of it at a somewhat later date to
past and present engineering students of
University College, London. There are
points in the address which seem to me to
need consideration at the present time from
a somewhat wider audience, and in the hope
of inciting those of my countrymen who are
working for the reorganization of the nation
to consider more closely these problems, I
now venture to publish it.

K. P.

27923^

NATIONAL LIFE

FROM THE STANDPOINT OF
SCIENCE

In the fore-part of this year, when I was
asked to give a lecture at Newcastle, the
minds of men were not inclined to be in-
terested in the fascinating problems of pure
science. The spirits of one and all, what-
ever their political party or their opinions on
the rights or wrongs of British action in
South Africa might be, were depressed in a
manner probably never before experienced
by those of our countrymen now living. We
can, in the light of what has happened since,
afford, perhaps, to admit the truth now. We
had been defeated, I may evefi venture to
say badly defeated, by a social organism far

lo National Life

less highly developed and infinitely smaller
than our own. We felt like the giant be-
wildered, not by the strength, but by the
skill and ingenuity, of our opponent. We
had lost the power of foreseeing, and our
soldiers the power of adapting themselves to
a change of environment. We had to learn
from our foe the very armament suitable to
the conditions ; we had to learn that guns of
great calibre could be taken into the field
and, what is more, withdrawn from it ; we
had to learn the arts of making and of taking
shelter; we had to learn the existence of
something which was neither cavalry nor
mounted infantry ; we, a nation of horse-
breeders and horse-riders, had to learn the
right horse for a rough country and the
right manner of handling him ; nay, to some
troops we even issued a new rifle, and let
them practically gain their first experience
of it in the field. We, no doubt, felt in
those days of depression that we should
learn, or partially learn, all this, and per-
haps more; we hoped, with a distinguished
statesman, that we should 'muddle through
somehow.' We refrained, if not completely.

from the Standpoint of Science 1 1

yet fairly successfully, from making scape-
goats.

But those who saw beyond the immediate
national danger were filled with a more
abiding sense of risk. They recognised that
the struggle for existence among nations will
not necessarily be settled in favour of the
biggest nation, nor in favour of the best-
armed nation, nor in favour of the nation
with the greatest material resources. I speak
not only of war, but of the more silent, but
none the less intense, struggle of peace — the
struggle for trade, for commercial supremacy,
for new sources of food supply, for mineral
wealth, and for the raw materials of manu-
facture. Size and armament and material
prosperity, of course, all tell ; hardihood,
bravery, and endurance all tell too, although
not so overwhelmingly as in the days of
Queen Bess. But none of these alone will
suffice. Here are the flesh, blood, and
sinews of a nation, but to make it foremost
in the struggle, to make it a homogeneous,
highly-organized whole, you must have a
complex nervous system, the reflex actions
of which are not merely automatic, but under

12 National Life

the control of that classified experience which
we term wisdom.

We all know how to act in our wonted
circumstances, under our usual environment :
our reactions are almost automatic ; but given
new circumstances and an unusual environ-
ment, then prompt action means foresight,
training, that rapid application of the truths
learned from past experience to new facts
which from various standpoints in life we
call ingenuity, business -habit, scientific in-
sight, wisdom, or, even more comprehensively,
brains. What is here said of an individual
is true of a nation. The nation, however
prosperous, however hardy, however big,
will fail when it comes to a crisis, when it
is suddenly placed in a new environment,
unless it has organized brain-power control-
ling its nervous system right away to the
smallest outlying points. Hardihood, big
battalions, command of the purse, may
enable us to struggle through in either peace
or war so long as we have only to meet
small or semi-organized opponents, but they
will not avail when great nation meets great
nation ; then it is the codified experience

from the Standpoint of Science 13

and the organized brain-power which tell in
the struggle.

It was consciousness of this lack of real
insight — not in one, but in many depart-
ments of national life — which gave an abiding
gloom to the depression arising from our dif-
ficulties at the commencement of the year.
It was not only the need of 'somehow
muddling through' this matter, but the
problem of how we were to provide against
graver crises in the future, which depressed
many. How was the nation's own fault to be
brought home to it ? How could it become a
more highly-organized whole, profiting to the
full by such brains as our race possesses .'^
Such thoughts as these, rather than the
purely intellectual problems of science, filled
my mind when your invitation to lecture in
Newcastle reached me, and they led me
more or less directly to try and emphasize
the national value of science.

Qprom the standpoint of science there are
two questions we can, or, rather, we musi,
ask. First : What, from the scientific stand-
point, is the function of a nation? What
part from the natural history aspect does the

14 National Life

national organization play in the universal
struggle for existence ? And, secondly, What
has science to tell us of the best methods of
fitting the nation for its task r\

To answer the latter question at all
effectually, we must first consider what is
the proper answer to be given to the former.
I shall therefore endeavour to lay in broad
outlines before you what I hold to be the
scientific view of a nation, and of the re-
lationship of nations to each other. If at
the very offset my statements strike you as
harsh, cold, possibly immoral, I would ask
you to be patient with me to the end, when
some of you may perceive that the public
conscience, the moral goodness which you
value so highly, is established by science on
a firmer and more definite, if a narrower,
foundation than you are wont to suppose.

I want you to look with me for awhile on
mankind as a product of Nature, and sub-
ject to the natural influences which form its
environment. I will, first, notice a point
which bears upon man as upon all forms of
animal life. The characters of both parents —
their virtues, their vices, their capabilities,

from the Standpoint of Science 15

their tempers, their diseases — all devolve in
due proportion upon their children. Some
may say, * Oh yes ; but we know such things
are inherited/ I fear that the great majority
of the nation does not realize what inheritance
means, or much that happens now would not
be allowed to happen. - Our knowledge of
heredity has developed enormously in the
last few years ; it is no longer a vague factor
of development, to be appealed to vaguely.
Its intensity in a great variety of characters
in a great many forms of life has been
quantitatively determined, and we no longer
stand even where we did ten years ago.
The form of a man*s head, his stature, his
eye-colour, his temper, the very length of his
life, the coat colour of horses and dogs, the
form of the capsule of the poppy, the spine
; of the water- flea, these and other things are
: all inherited, and in approximately the same
; manner. Nay, if we extend the notion of
like producing like, we shall find, as I have
recently done, that the same laws are probably
true for the mushroom and for the forest
tree ; that the principle of heredity runs with
certainly no weakened intensity from the

1 6 National Life

lowest to the highest organisms^ and from
their least to their most important char-
acters.

Now, let us try to understand exacdy what
this means. Of a definite child of A and B
we can assert nothing ¥rith certainty, but of
all the children of a definite class of parents
like A and B we can assert that a definite
proportion wiU have a definite amount of
any character of A and B with a certainty as
great as that of any scientific prediction what-
ever. I am not speaking from belief or from
theory, but simply from facts, from thousands
of instances recorded by my fellow-workers
or myself. Here is a great principle of life,
something apparendy controlling all life from
its simplest to its most complex forms, and
yet, although we too often see its relendess
effects, we go on hoping that at any rate we
and our offspring shall be the exceptions to
its rules. For one of us as an individual
this may be true, but for the average oL us
all, for the nation as a whole, it is an idle
hope. You cannot change the leopard's
spots, and you cannot change bad stock to
good; you may dilute it, possibly spread it

from the Standpoint of Science 17

over a wider area, spoiling good stock, but
until it ceases to multiply it will not cease to
be. A physically and mentally well-ordered
individual will arise as a variation in bad
stock, or possibly may result from special
nurture, but the old evils will in all proba-
bility reappear in a definite percentage of
the offspring.

I know of the case of just such a good
variation appearing in a certain bad stock as
far back as 1680, and the offspring of which
married in the early eighteenth century into a
number of good stocks, several of which we
can trace in the records of the religious com-
munity of which they were members for
nearly 150 years. And what do we find."^ In
each generation the same sort of proportion of
cases of drunkenness, insanity, and physical
breakdown arising to distress and perplex
their kinsfolk.

Now, if we once realize that this law of
inheritance is as inevitable as the law of
gravity, we shall cease to struggle against
it. This does not mean a fatal resignation
to the presence of bad stock, but a conscious
attempt to modify the percentage of it in our

2

i8 Natioiial Life

own community and in the worid at large.
Let me illustrate what I mean. A showman
takes a wolf and, by aid of training and
nurture, a more or less judicious administra-
tion of food and whip, makes it apparendy
docile and friendly as a dog. But one day,
when the whip is not there, it is quite possible
that the wolf wiD turn upon its keeper, or
upon somebody else. Even if it does not,
its offspring will not benefit by the parental
education. I don't believe that the showman's
way can be a permanent success ; I believe,
however, that you might completely domesti-
cate the wolf, as the dog has been domesti-
cated, by steadily selecting the more docile
members of the community through several
generations, and breeding only from these,
rejecting the remainder. Now, if you have
once realized the force of heredity, you will
see in natural selection — that choice of the
physically and mentally fitter to be the
parents of the next generation — a most
munificent provision for the progress of all
forms of life. Nurture and education may
immensely aid the social machine, but they
must be repeated generation by generation ;

from the Standpoint of Science 19

they will not in themselves reduce the ten-
dency to the jproduction of bad stock. Con-
scious or unconscious selection can alone
bring that about.

What I have said about bad stock seems to
me to hold for the lower races of man. How
many centuries, how many thousands of years,
have the Kaffir and the Negro held large
districts in Africa undisturbed by the white
man ? Yet their inter-tribal struggles have
not yet produced a civilization in the least
comparable with the Aryan. Educate and
nurture them as you will, I do not believe
that you will succeed in modifying the stock.
History shows me one way, and one way
only, in which a high state of civilization has
been produced, namely, the struggle of race
with race, and the survival of the physically
and mentally fitter race. If you want to
know whether the lower races of man can
evolve a higher type, I fear the only course
is to leave them to fight it out among
themselves, and even then the struggle for
existence between individual and individual,
between tribe and tribe, may not be sup-
ported by that physical selection due to a

2 — 2

20 National Life

particular climate on which probably so
much of the Aryan's success depended.

If you bring the white man into contact
¥rith the black, you too often suspend the
very process of natural selection on which
the evolution of a higher type depends. You
get superior and inferior races living on the
same soil, and that co-existence is demoraliz-
ing for both. They naturally sink into the
position of master and servant, if not ad-
mittedly or covertly into that of slave-owner
and slave. Frequendy they intercross, and
if the bad stock be raised the good is lowered.
Even in the case of Eurasians, of whom I
have met mentally and physically fine speci-
mens, I have felt how much better they would
have been had they been pure Asiatics or pure
Europeans. Thus it comes about that when
the struggle for existence between races is
suspended, the solution of great problems
may be unnaturally postponed ; instead of the
slow, stern processes of evolution, cataclysmal
solutions are prepared for the future. Such
problems in suspense, it appears to me, are
to be found in the negro population of the
Southern States of America, in the large ad-

from the Standpoint of Science 21

mixture of Indian blood in some of the South
American races, but above all, in the Kaffir
factor in South Africa.

You may possibly think that I am straying
from my subject, but I want to justify natural
selection to you. I want you to see selection
as something which renders the inexorable
law of heredity a source of progress, which
produces the good through suffering, an in-
finitely greater good which far outbalances the
very obvious pain and evil. Let us suppose
the alternative were possible. Let us suppose
we could prevent the white man, if we liked,
from going to lands of which the agricul-
tural and mineral resources are not worked
to the full ; then I should say a thousand
times better for him that he should not go
than that he should settle down and live
alongside the inferior race. The only healthy
alternative is that he should go, and com-
pletely drive out the inferior race. That is
practically what the white man has done in
North America. We sometimes forget the
light that chapter of history throws on more
recent experiences. Some 250 years ago
there was a man who fought in our country

22 National Life

against taxation without representation, and
another man who did not mind going to
prison for the sake of his religious opinions.
As Englishmen we are proud of them both,
but we sometimes forget that they were both
considerable capitalists for their age, and
started chartered companies in another con-
tinent. Well, a good deal went on in the
plantations they founded, if not with their
knowledge, with that at least of their servants
and of their successors, which would shock us
at the present day. But I venture to say
that no man calmly judging will wish either
that the whites had never gone to America,
or would desire that whites and Red
Indians were to-day living alongside each
other as negro and white in the Southern
States, as Kaffir and European in 3outh
Africa, still less that they had mixed their
blood as Spaniard and Indian in South
America. The civilization of the white man
is a civilization dependent upon free white
labour, and when that element of stability
is removed it will collapse like those of
Greece and Rome. I venture to assert, then,
that the struggle for existence between white

from the Standpoint of* Science 23

and red man, painful and even terrible as it
was in its details, has given us a good far
outbalancing its immediate evil. In place of
the red man, contributing practically nothing
to the work and thought of the world, we
have a great nation, mistress of many arts,
and able, with its youthful imagination and
fresh, untrammelled impulses, to contribute
much to the common stock of civilized man.
Against that you have only to put the
romantic sympathy for the Red Indian
generated by the novels of Cooper and the
poems of Longfellow, and then — see how
little it weighs in the balance 1

But America is but one case in which we
have to mark a masterful human progress
following an inter-racial struggle. The Aus-
tralian nation is another case of a great civil-
ization supplanting a lower race unable to work
to the full the land and its resources. Further
back in history you find the same tale with
almost every European nation. Sometimes
when the conquering race is not too diverse
in civilization and in type of energy there is
an amalgamation of races, as when Norman
and Anglo-Saxon ultimately blended; at

44 National Life

other times the inferior race is driven out
before the superior, as the Celt drove out the
Iberian. The struggle means suffering,
intense suffering, while it is in progress ; but
that struggle and that suffering have been
the stages by which the white man has
reached his present stage of development,
and they account for the fact that he no
longer lives in caves and feeds on roots and
nuts. Qrhis dependence of progress on the
survival of the fitter race, terribly black as it
may seem to some of you, gives the struggle
for existence its redeeming features ; it is the
fiery crucible out of which comes the finer
metal. You may hope for a time when the
sword shall be turned into the ploughshare,
when American and German and English
traders shall no longer compete in the markets
of the world for their raw material and for
their food supply, when the white man and
the dark shall share the soil between them,
and each till it as he lists. But, believe me,
when that day comes, mankind will no longer
progress ; there will be nothing to check the
fertility of inferior stock ; the relentless law
of heredity will not be controlled and guided

from the Standpoint of Science 25

by natural selection. Man will stagnate ;
and unless he ceases to multiply, the catas-
trophe will come again ; famine and pesti-
lence, as we see them in the East, physical
selection instead of the struggle of race
against race, will do the work more relent-
lessly, and, to judge from India and China,
far less efficiently than of olcTl

Let us face this question* of increasing
population boldly. We cannot escape it.
Sooner or later it must and will make itself
felt in every progressive nation ; for what I
have said of the struggle of race against race
makes itself again felt within every commu-
nity. A nation like the French can largely
limit the number of its offspring, but how
shall we be sure that these offspring are from
the better and not from the inferior stock ? If
they come equally from both stocks and there
be no wastage, then the nation has ceased to
progress ; it stagnates. I feel sure that a
certain amount of wastage is almost neces-
sary for a progressive nation ; you want
definite evidence that the inferior stocks are
not able to multiply at will, that a certain
standard of physique and brains are needful

26 National Life

to a man if he wishes to settle and have a
family.

Mr. Francis Galton has suggested that we
might progress far more rapidly than we at
present do under this crude system of un-
conscious wastage if we turned our thoughts
more consciously to the problem, if we em-
phasized the need of social action in this
direction, and made men and women feel the
importance of good parentage for the citizens
of the future. But I fear our present
economic and social conditions are hardly
yet ripe for such a movement (the all-im-
portant question of parentage is still largely
felt to be solely a matter of family, and not
of national importance. Yet, how anti-
\/ social such a view may be can be easily

realized. From the standpoint of the nation
we want to inculcate a feeling of shame in
the parents of a weakling, whether it be
mentally or physically unfit. We want
parents to grasp that they have given birth to
a new citizen, and that this involves, on the
one hand, a duty towards the community in
respect of his breed and nurture, and a claim,
on the other hand, of the parents on the

from the Standpoint of Science 27

State, that the latter shall make the condi-
tions of life favourable to the rearing of
healthy, mentally vigorous men and women.
Bear in mind that one quarter only of the
married people of this country — say, a sixth to
an eighth of the adult population — produce
50 per cent of the next generation. You
will then see how essential it is for the main-
tenance of a physically and mentally fit race
that this one-sixth to one-eighth of our
population should be drawn from the best
and not the worst stocksil A nation that
begins to tamper with its'^^fertility may un-
consciously have changed its national charac-
teristics before two generations have passed.
France is becoming a land of Bretons
because the Bretons alone have large families.
And what about England ? Our birth-rate has
been going down for, perhaps, thirty years.
Who will venture to assert that this decreased
fertility has occurred in the inferior stocks ?
On the contrary, is it not the feckless and
improvident who have the largest families ?
The professional classes, the trading classes,
the substantial and provident working classes
— shortly, the capable elements of the com-

28 National Life

munity with a certain standard of life — have
been marrying late, have been having small
families, have been increasing their individual
comfort, and all this is at the expense of the
nation's future. We cannot suspend the
struggle for existence in any class of the com-
munity without stopping progress ; we cannot
recruit the nation from its inferior stocks
without deteriorating our national character.
Now, what have our economic conditions
in England been during the last thirty years ?
The accumulation of wealth has been such
at one end of society that no test of brains
or of physique was needful before a man
multiplied his type. Death duties and the
inherent tendency of folly to squander its
substance were only very inefficient, very
partial, checks on the endowment in perpe-
tuity of the brainless. At the other end of
society we allowed a condition of affairs to
exist in which no greater discomfort could
well be produced by the introduction of addi-
tional human beings ; there were always
charity and the State ready to provide, more
or less inefficiently, for the surplus popula-
tion. There has been scarcely any check on

from the Standpoint of Science 29

the multiplication of inferior stock ; only in
the middle ranks, among the more sub-
stantial workers with the hand and the head,
have men regarded the number of their off-
spring and made success in life's struggle to
some extent a condition of their multiplica-
tion.

Now, surely this is a very dangerous state
of affairs for the nation at large. A crisis
may come in which we may want all the
brain and all the muscle we can possibly lay
our hands on, and we may find that there is
a dearth of ability and a dearth of physique,
because we have allowed inferior stock to
multiply at the expense of the better. There
are occasions when a nation wants a reserve
of strong men, and when it must draw brain
and muscle from classes and from forms of
work wherein they are not exercised to the
full. And in that day woe to the nation
which has recruited itself from the weaker
and not from the stronger stocks! If you
have not the means to start all your offspring
in your own class, let them do the work of
another; if you cannot make them into lawyers
and engineers, let them be village school-

30 - National Life

masters and mechanics. Or, if this should
raise an insurmountable, if utterly false, shame,
let them go to new lands even as miners,
cowboys, and storekeepers ; they will
strengthen the nation's reserve, and this is
far better than that they should never ftve
existed at all.

I will not say that we have a \ of

ability and of physique at this ^^,„,.-r'-«nn: I
will venture to assert that there has, of recent
years, been a want of them in the right places,
and that last year, but for the reserve of
strong men in our colonies, we should have
been in far greater difficulties than we were.
/ It is not only in warfare — that is the crudest
form of the modern struggle of nations — but
in manufacture and in commerce that there
has been a want of brains in the right place.
Leadership in trade is really no more than
leadership in the army open to the man of
brains ; in both cases it becomes a question
of wealth ; the endowed but brainless get the
start. Consider, again, how the led are, in
many cases, not the mentally and physically
best for the task; they are too often the
surplus of the inferior stocks. What wonder

from the Standpoint of Science 31

when we put the one in competition with the
brains and training of the German com-
mercial and technical houses we meet defeat !
What wonder that, when we take the other
out of its environment, the leaders cannot
lead, and the led fall an easy prey to sickness
and disease ? The regiment which has
marched farthest and has marched quickest,
which has suffered little from disease and
fought as well as any in the Transvaal, is a
volunteer regiment, drawn from that very
reserve of strength in the better stocks to
which I have referred.

In industry it is the same thing. We
shall do no good against the American and
the German by a mere multiplication of
centres of technical instruction. What we
want to do is to bring brains into our in-
dustry from top to bottom. ... Where the
brains already exist, there training will work
wonders ; but we shall not make the product
of inferior stock capable men by merely
teaching them the tricks of their trade. In
one polytechnic I found lads learning how
to fold cretonnes and polish mahogany ; that
is to say, the manufacturers had thrust the

32 National Life

cost of apprenticeship on the public purse,
perhaps to some extent lowering the price
of sofas and easy-chairs to those who care
about them. The object of any technical
education paid for by the State or the muni-
cipality should be the exercise of brain-power,
mental gymnastics in the best sense ; it
should treat of the science, and not the art,
of a trade. Such education — education, re-
member, means literally a drawing out, not
a cramming in— ought to act as a brain-
stretcher, and not attempt to communicate
mere trade knowledge. Where it does the
latter — and in how many cases does it not,
under our brand-new system of technical
instruction } — then it is merely relieving the
manufacturers, and possibly the purchasers,
of certain goods of such part of their cost as
has hitherto been paid for apprenticeship.
On the other hand, when technical education
acts as a brain-stretcher, then this increased
efficiency tells not only on the trade occupa-
tions, but on the social and civic life of the
educated ; the nation is thereby strengthen-
ing the reserve of trained brains upon which
it can draw in a crisis for all sorts of other

from the Standpoint of Science 33

functions than those of a narrow trade.
Brain - stretching fosters an adaptability to
new environments. This is something very
different to a more complete knowledge of
trade processes or to proficiency in a special
handicraft. This is a form of education for
which the nation may legitimately pay ; it is
that which is essential to it in the struggle
for existence.

I am not speaking without some ex-
perience. I have been engaged for sixteen
years in helping to train engineers, and those
of my old pupils who are now coming to the
front in life are not those who stuck to facts
and formulae, and sought only for what they
thought would be * useful to them in their
profession.* On the contrary, the lads who
paid attention to method, who thought more
of proofs than of formulae, who accepted even
the specialized branches of their training as
a means of developing habits of observation
rather than of collecting * useful facts,' these
lads have developed into men who are suc-
ceeding in life. And the reason of this seems
to me, when considering their individual
cases, to be that they could adapt themselves

3

34 National Life

to an environment more or less different
from that of the existing profession ; they
could go beyond its processes, its formulae,
and its facts, and develop new ones. Their
knowledge of method and their powers of
observation enabled them to supply new
needs, to answer to the call when there was
a demand, not for old knowledge, but for
trained brains.

[Here, I think, is the point where we
reach the second great function of science in
national life. The first function is to show
us what national life means, and how the
nation is a vast organism subject as much to
the great forces of evolution as any other
gregarious type of life. There is a struggle
of race against race and of nation against
nation. In the early days of that struggle it
was a blind, unconscious struggle of barbaric
tribes. At the present day, in the case of
the civilized white man, it has become more
and more the conscious, carefully directed
attempt of the nation to fit itself to a con;
tinuously changing environment. The nation
has to foresee how and where the struggle
will be carried on ; the maintenance of

from the Standpoint of Science 35

national position is becoming more and more
a conscious preparation for changing con-
ditions, an insight into the needs of coming
environmentsj

This is the second important duty of
science in relation to national life. It has to
develop our brain-power by providing a
training in method and by exercising our
powers of cautious observation. It has to
teach not only the leaders of our national
life, but the people at large, to prepare for
and meet the difficulties of new environments.
This is the only sort of technical education
the nation ought to trouble about, the teach-
ing people to see and to think. It is not
the art of a particular trade which we want
to teach in the schools, but the power of
observing and reasoning upon observation.

There is a most simple description of true
science which is embraced in the words :
Keep your eyes open and apply common-sense.
That is the keynote to the conduct of the
geologist who has roughly sketched the
history of many thousand years as he walked
across the downs with you, of the engineer
who rapidly reports on a new country, of

3—2

3^ National Life

the doctor who forms rapid diagnoses as
he paces the hospital ward ; it is trained
observation applied to physical and human
nature. There is a very excellent little
book which many of you may have read
recently, Baden - Powell's ' Aids to Scout-
ing ' ; it is a capital introduction to the
true scientific method. [The man with a
scientific training scouts through Nature,
including under nature mankind itself You
may sum up his conduct just as I think
Baden-Poweirs booklet may be summed up
\J — Keep your eyes open and apply common-
sense. What we as a nation seem to want
at the present time is precisely what Sir
Red vers Duller complained of our army
needing in Natal — scoutin£\ I take it that
the success of German technical instruction
is just proportional to its efficiency in pro-
ducing trained scouts. We have only just
started our technical schools, but I sadly fear
they are not putting sufficient stress on
scouting, on teaching how to observe and
how to reason, on observation as distinct
from a knowledge of facts, from a training in
art or handicraft. Mechanical skill, the trick

from the Standpoint of Science 37

of the trade, may be learnt best in the work-
shop ; facts and formulae may be found in
books ; processes followed in the foundry
and the weaving-shed in a manner that can
only be mimicked in the schools ; but true
scouting can be learnt only from the master-
scout. And here arises the real value of a
band of men trained to observe and reason.
This is why we want scientific schools and
men of science if the nation is to maintain
its position.

If you turn in almost any direction, you
will see this want of trained scouts. We
want them in our diplomatic service to keep
their hand on the pulse of other nations ; we
want them in new countries to tell us of new
mineral and new food supplies ; we want
them, above all, in our trade, to tell us what
to make and how and where to send it ; we
want them to see what competitive nations
are doing, and to provide for our mercantile
marine, our railways, our manufactures being
maintained at the highest state of efficiency.
Shortly, we want scouting in all branches of
the national service ; we need men who will
observe what others are doing, who will seek

38 National Life

for new supplies, and push the nation and
prepare cautiously for its advance in every
way.

I will not underrate the importance of the
equipment of the scout. He undoubtedly
profits by technical knowledge. You cannot
send a man to push trade if he have no
knowledge of the language of the people he
has to deal with, or an engineer to discover
mineral resources without an elementary
acquaintance with geology. But I insist
that the trained mind is the first thing, and
for scouting a fool on horseback is worth less
than a wise man on foot. We are a wealthy
nation, and I fear we find it easier to provide
the equipment than to discover the master-
scout. I have yet to learn that the physicist
with palatial laboratory and elaborate and
costly implements will do more for his pupils
than the man with no instrument-maker
behind him. The biologist with his ;^8o
microscopes and specimens drawn from the
four quarters of the globe may teach less
than the field naturalist with the hedgerow
and the lens. One of the first lessons of
scouting is independence of equipment, the

from the Standpoint of Science 39

doing of great things with small means;
and magnificent equipment, the provision of
elaborate instruments and highly - trained
mechanicians, too often renders your man
of science and his pupils helpless in a less
palatial environment. We are not going to
get technical education by merely paying for
it. You may show wonderful buildings,
dazzling equipments, a network of examina-
tions, and a crowd of certificated examinees,
but this will not insure the training the
nation wants in observation and in reasoning
on observation.

[We must, above all, exercise the selective
faculty and choose true master-scouts, giving
them a free hand, and they will teach our
lads to observe and think scientifically. That
is the only form of technical education which
will produce the scouting power the nation
needs. Some may say that this is pure
science, and not technical instruction at all.
I am not prepared to say it is not. I don't
care a rap, and don't believe anyone with
educational interests at heart does care a
rap, for the facts and formulae and results of
science being crammed into all classes of the

40 National Life

community; they may be useful enough to
men of special trades and professions. But
what the nation does want in order to
strengthen its civil and commercial life is a
great increase in its powers of observation,
in its knowledge of scientific method and of
the nature of scientific reasoning. The rest,
the greater efficiency in trade and.handicraft,
will follow surely enough on that^^^AIake
the man intellectually stronger, and he will
be a better soldier, a better trader, and a
better craftsman. Teach the man how to
scout in the first place, and then he will
know for himself the sort of equipment he
wants and how it is to be provided. You
furnish a charger and a sword, where per-
adventure a pony and a hatchet are what the
trained scout would select for himself. Know-
ledge is the equipment which the trained
mind can find for itself, but the training is a
thing you have got to provide for it, and the
national value of science lies first in the
training it can furnish, and only in the second
place in its practical results!^

There has been far too much talk about
the national utility of science, and too little

from the Standpoint of Science 41

stress laid on its educational value. * I want
my son to learn what will be useful to him
in his profession in life ' is the statement I
have heard from one parent after another.
* I want my son to know how to observe and
to think/ is the expression of a desire which
I have not yet come across. This is the
spirit which has ruled the movement for
technical education ; but if this spirit is to
remain dominant, it will take a great deal to
get the nation out of the present ruts. What
^we^ want are trained brains, scouts in all
fields, and not a knowledge of facts and
processes crammed into a wider range of
untrained minds.

It may be as well now to sum up my
position as far as I have yet developed it.
I have asked you to look upon the nation as
an organized whole in continual struggle with
other nations, whether by force of arms or
by force of trade and economic processes.
I have asked you to look upon this struggle
of either kind as a not wholly bad thing ; it
is the source of human progress throughout
the world's history. But if a nation is to
maintain its position in this struggle, it must

42 National Life

be fully provided with trained brains in every
department of national activity, from the
government to the factory, and have, if
possible, a reserve of brain and physique to
fall back upon in times of national crisis.
Recent events in our commercial as well as
in our military experience have led some to
doubt whether our supply of trained brains
is sufficient, or, at any rate, whether it is
available in the right place at the right
moment. Those presumably who hold that
the brains are forthcoming have raised the
cry of technical instruction, which is to be
a remedy for our commercial difficulties. I
have little doubt that when this war is
finished the cry of military instruction will
be raised for our army difficulties. In the
latter as in the former case large sums of
money will no doubt be demanded for equip-
ment. But I have endeavoured to indicate
that there are two preliminary matters to be
considered. First, are we quite certain that
we have a reserve of brain power ready to
be trained? We have to remember that
man is subject to the universal law of in-
heritance, and that a dearth of capacity may

from the Standpoint of Science 43

arise if we recruit our society from the in-
ferior and not the better stock. If any social
opinions or class prejudices tamper with the
fertility of the better stocks, then the national
character will take but a few generations to
be seriously modified. The pressure of
population should always tend to push brains
and physique into occupations where they
are not a primary necessity, for in this way
a reserve is formed for the times of national
crisis. Such a reserve can always be formed
by filling up with men of our own kith and
kin the waste lands of the earth, even at the
expense of an inferior race of inhabitants.
Yet if we grant that our nation has a full
supply of brains both in action and in reserve,
it is not knowledge in the first place, but
intellectual training, which is requisite. We
want the master-scout to teach men to ob-
serve and reason on their observations, and
the equipment of the scout, the actual know-
ledge of facts and processes, is a minor
matter.

You will see that|nvy view — and I think it j
may be called the scientific view of a nation
— is that of an organized whole, kept up to a

44 National Life

high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring
that its numbers are substantially recruited
from the better stocks, and kept up to a high
pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly
by way of war with inferior races, and with
equal races by the struggle for trade-routes
and for the sources of raw material and of
food supplyT} This is the natural history view
of mankind, and I do not think you can in
its main features subvert it. Some of you
may refuse to acknowledge it, but you cannot
really study history and refuse to see its force.
Some of you may realize it, and then despair
of life ; you may decline to admit any glory
in a world where the superior race must
either eject the inferior, or, mixing with it or
even living alongside it, degenerate itself.
What beauty can there be when the battle is
to the stronger, and the weaker must suffer
in the struggle of nations and in the struggle
of individual men ? You may say : Let us
cease to struggle, let us leave the lands of
the world to the races that cannot profit by
them to the full, let us cease to compete in
the markets of the world. Well, we could
do it, if we were a small nation living on the

from the Standpoint of Science 45

produce of our own soil, and a soil so worth-
less that no other race envied it and sought
to appropriate it. We should cease to ad-
vance ; but then we should naturally give up
progress as a good which comes through
suffering. I say it is possible for a small
rural community to stand apart from the
world-contest and to stagnate, if no more
powerful nation wants its possessions.

But are we such a community ? Is it not
a fact that the daily bread of our millions
of workers depends on their having some-
body to work for ? that if we give up the
contest for trade-routes and for free markets
and for waste lands, we indirectly give up our
food-supply ? Is it not a fact that our strength
depends on these and upon our colonies, and
that our colonies have been won by the ejec-
tion of inferior races, and are maintained
against equal races only by respect for their
and our present power ? If war or competition
lessen the China trade, if a bad harvest or
a flood check the import of Egyptian or
American cotton, it is the Lancashire operative
who feels the pinch. The day when we cease
to hold our own among the nations will be the

46 National Life

day of catastrophe for our workers at home.
We could return to the condition of medieval
England, to the condition of Norway or
Denmark, but only by a process of intense
selection, reducing our millions in a manner
which the imagination refuses to contemplate.
Being as we are, we cannot give up the
struggle, and the moment dearth of ability,
the want of brains and physique in the right
place, leads to serious defeat, our catastrophe
will come. That is the vision which de-
pressed thoughtful men at the beginning of
this year ; that is the dread which must be
ever in the mind of the true statesman when
he seeks, on the one hand, to curb the rash
venture which may overstrain our power, and
on the other hand, to maintain our right to
work the unutilized resources of earth, be
they in Africa or in Asia.

Struggle of race against race, and of man
against man — if this be the scientific view of
life, the basis of human progress — how have
human love and sympathy come to play such
a great part in the world ? Here, again, I
think science has something to say, although
the earlier interpreters of evolution rather

from the Standpoint of Science 47

obscured it. They painted evolution as the
survival of the fittest individual^ and spoke
of his struggle against his fellows.

But this is not the only form of selection at
work ; it is often quite the least effective
phase of the contest. Consciously or uncon-
sciously, one type of life is fighting against a
second type, and all life is struggling with its
physical environment. The safety of a gre-
garious animal — and man is essentially such
—depends upon the intensity with which the
social instinct has been developed. (The
stability of a race depends entirely on the
extent to which the social feelings have got
a real hold on it. The race, which allows the
physically or mentally stronger Tom to make
the existence of the somewhat inferior Jack
impossible, will never succeed when it comes
into contest with a second race. Jack has
no interests in common with Tom ; the op-
pressed will hardly get worse terms from a
new master. That is why no strong and
permanent civilization can be built upon
slave labour, why an inferior race doing
menial labour for a superior race can give
no stable community ; that is why we shall

J

v.^^^ 48 National Life

never have a healthy social state in South
Africa until the white man replaces the dark
in the fields and in the mines, and the Kaffir
is pushed back towards the equator. The
nation organized for the struggle must be a
homogeneous whole, not a mixture of superior
and inferior races. For this reason every
new land we colonize with white men is a
source of strength ; every land of coloured
men we simply rule may be needful as a
source of food and mineral wealth, but it is
not an element of stability to our community,
and must ever be regarded with grave anxiety
by our statesmen?}

Crhis need for homogeneity in a nation
may be pushed further. You must not have
class differences and wealth differences and
education differences so great within the com-
munity that you lose the sense of common
y interest, and feel only the pressure of the

struggle of man against man. No tribe of
men can work together unless the tribal
interest dominates the personal and indi-
vidual interest at all points where they come
into conflictTl The struggle among primitive
man of tribe against tribe evolved the social

from the Standpoint of Science 49

instinct. The tribe with the greater social
feeling survived ; we have to thank the
struggle for existence for first making man
gregarious, and then intensifying, stage by
stage, the social feeling. Such is the scien-
tific account of the origin of our social in-
stincts ; and if you come to analyze it such is
the origin of what we term morality; morality
is only the developed form of the tribal habit,
the custom of acting in a certain way towards
our fellows, upon which the very safety of the
tribe originally depended. Philosophies may
be invented, the supersensuous appealed to,
in order to increase the sanctions on social
or moral conduct ; but the natural history of
morality begins with the kin, spreads to the
tribe, to the nation, to allied races, and ulti-
mately to inferior races and lower types of
life, but ever with decreasing intensity. The
demands upon the spirit of self-sacrifice which
can be made by our kin, by our countrymen,
by Europeans, by Chinamen, by Negroes, and
by Kaffirs, by animals, may not be clearly de-
fined ; but, on the average, they admit of rough
graduation, and we find in practice, whatever
be our fine philosophies, that the instinct to

4

50 National Life

self-sacrifice wanes as we go down in the
scale.

The man who tells us that he feels to all
men alike, that he has no sense of kinship,
that he has no patriotic sentiment, that he
loves the Kaffir as he loves his brother, is
probably deceiving himself. If he is not,
then all we can say is that a nation of such
men, or even a nation with a large minority
of such men, will not stand for many genera-
tions ; it cannot survive in the struggle of the
nations, it cannot be a factor in the contest
upon which human progress ultimately de-
pends. The national spirit is not a thing to
be ashamed of, as the educated man seems
occasionally to hold. If that spirit be the
mere excrescence of the music-hall, or an
ignorant assertion of superiority to the
foreigner, it may be ridiculous, it may even be
nationally dangerous ; but if the national
spirit takes the form of a strong feeling of
the importance of organizing the nation as a
whole, of making its social and economic
conditions such that it is able to do its work
in the world and meet its fellows without
hesitation in the field and in the market, then

from the Standpoint of Science 51

it seems to me a wholly good spirit — indeed,
one of the highest forms of social, that is,
moral instinct.

So far from our having too much of this
spirit of patriotism, I doubt if we have
anything like enough of it. We wait to
improve the condition of some class of
workers until they themselves cry out or
even rebel against their economic condition.
We do not better their state because we
perceive its relation to the strength and
stability of the nation as a whole. Too often
it is done as the outcome of a blind class war.
tthe coal-owners, the miners, the manu-
facturers, the mill-hands, the landlords, the
farmers, the agricultural labourers, struggle
by fair means, and occasionally by foul,
against each other, and, in doing so, against
the nation at large, and our statesmen as a
rule look on. That was the correct attitude
from the standpoint of the old political eco-
nomy. It is not the correct attitude from the
standpoint of science ; for science realizes that
the nation is an organized whole, in continual
struggle with its competitors. You cannot
get a strong and effective nation if many of

4—2

J

52 National Life

its stomachs are half fed and many of its
brains untrained. We, as a nation, cannot
survive in the struggle for existence if we
allow class distinctions to permanently endow
the brainless and to push them into posts of
national responsibility. The true statesman
has to limit the internal struggle of the com-
munity in order to make it stronger for the
external struggle. We must reward ability,
we must pay for brains, we must give larger
advantage to physique ; but we must not do
this at a rate which renders the lot of the
mediocre an unhappy one. We must foster
exceptional brains and physique for national
purposes ; but, however useful prize-cattle
may be, they are not bred for their own sake,
but as a step towards the improvement of
the whole herdA

If I have put my position at all clearly,
you will see how the key to it lies in the
gregarious nature of man. The older evolu-
tionists overlooked several of the factors of
the struggle for existence. They empha-
sized, in a way which now appears almost
absurd, the struggle of individual with in-
dividual. They do not appear to have

from the Standpoint of Science 53

recognised that many of the characters
which give man his foremost place in the
animal kingdom were evoked in the struggle
of tribe against tribe, of race against race,
and even of man as a whole against other
forms of life and against his physical en-
vironment. Like the older political econo-
mists, they thought all real progress depended
upon an all-round fight within the community.
They forgot that the herd exists owing to
its social instincts, and that human sympathy
and racial and national feelings are strong
natural forces controlling individual conduct
and economic theories based purely on
questions of supply and demand. It is the
herd, the tribe, or the nation which forms the
fundamental unit in the evolution of man,
and it is to the leaders of the herd, or nation,
that we ought to look for conscious recogni-
tion of this fact.

If they are true statesmen, they ought not
merely to advance in the direction they may
be pushed by the immediate needs of one
overburdened class, or by the overloud cry
of another for the time being dominant group;
they ought to look upon the community as

54 National Life

an organized whole, and treat class needs
and group cries from the standpoint of the
efficiency of the herd at large. Their duty
is to lessen, if not to suspend, the internal
struggle, that the nation may be strong ex-
ternally. One point only is fundamental in
that suspension of the internal struggle, and
this holds for man as for every gregarious
animal : social sympathy and State aid must
not be carried so far within the community
that the intellectually and physically weaker
stocks multiply at the same rate as the better
stocks.

[The dearth of brains and the dearth of
physique are the worst misfortunes that can
befall a nation, and yet how many of our
rulers realize that brains and physique are not
things scattered at random among the popu-
lation, which they can lay their hands on when-
ever they need them ? Our legislators get
wonderfully excited over laws relating to
horses and cattle ; they devote money and
time to breeding purposes, and realize the
strength of the law of inheritance when they
endow national studs and give prizes to en-
courage the maintenance of good stock, or

from the Standpoint of Science 55

when again they work for the establishment of
selected herds. But which of them has con-
sidered domestic legislation from the natural
history standpoint ? What statesman has re-
membered that in the character of the national
fertility of to-day is written the strength or
weakness of the nation to - morrow ? I
fear we leave these things to chance, to
the caprice of individual selfishness. ^As
long as the social conditions were such that
the weak within the community were not
protected by the State ; as long as there
was no restriction on the fertility of the
better stocks, we might in a rough-and-
ready manner trust that our population would
be recruited from its fitter members. But
with the social movements of the present
day, the reduction in infantile mortality, prin-
cipally of the inferior stocks, the reduction
in the birth-rate, principally of the superior
stocks, science may well call the attention of
our rulers to a possible famine — a day when
we shall want brains and want physique, and
shall not find the necessary reserve of them.'X
Take the case of genius alone. Mr.
Galton has shown us that it largely arises

56 National Life

from special stocks ; but if those stocks de-
crease their output, then by so much does
the rare chance of a man of genius appearing
grow rarer. Again, I repeat, we may, after
all, only want brains in the right place. But
besides the need of them in South Africa,
which was recently fairly manifest, look to
any branch of national life, and may we not
fear the dearth has already begun ? Where
are the young men in the political world who
can stir even a small section of the community
to united action? Where are the younger
civil servants to replace our dying pro-
consuls, and to whom the nation can commit
with a feeling of security and confidence the
future problems of South Africa? Where
are the new writers to whom the nation
listens as it did to Carlyle, Ruskin, and
Browning ? or for whose books it eagerly
waits as for those of Thackeray and George
Eliot? Where are the leaders of science
who will make the epoch that Darwin and
Huxley made in biology, or Faraday and
Clerk Maxwell in physics ? There may be
steady average ability, but where is the fire
of genius, the spirit of enthusiasm, which

from the Standpoint of Science 57

creates the leader of men either in thought
or action ? Alas ! it is difficult to see any
light on the horizon predicting the dawn of
an intellectual renaissance, or heralding social
and political reforms such as carried the
nation through the difficult fifty years of the
middle of this century. Possibly our strong
men may have got into the wrong places.
Ability may have drifted on to the Stock
Exchange, the race-course, or the cricket-
field, for aught I can say to the contrary ;
but I must confess to feeling sometimes that
an actual dearth is upon us. And if this
should be so, then the unchangeable law of
heredity shows us only too clearly the source :
we have multiplied from the inferior, and
not from the superior stocks.

I have laid special stress on this point, for
I want to impress you with two aspects under
which science is of national value. The one
is as a great factor of education. On its
facts and its formulae I lay no weight ; you
will find them appraised — nay, overvalued —
by the modern apostles of technical instruc-
tion. But education is not a communication
of knowledge ; it is a drawing out and an

58 National Life

exercising of brain power. Here science —
true science, in the hands of the master-scout
— can teach us to observe and infer from
observation more readily and more effectively
than perhaps any other form of mental dis-
cipline. It is the trained scout in all fields
of our national activity that we need so
badly.

The other aspect from which science claims
national value is from the interpretation it
puts upon the functions and the historical
development of the community. It teaches
us to examine the efficiency of the nation
from the natural history standpoint We find
that the law of the survival of the fitter is true
of mankind, but that the struggle is that of
the gregarious animal. A community not knit
together by strong social instincts, by sym-
pathy between man and man, and class and
class, cannot face the external contest, the
competition with other nations, by peace
or by war, for the raw material of pro-
duction and for its food supply. This
struggle of tribe with tribe, and nation with
nation, may have its mournful side ; but we
see as a result of it the gradual progress of

from the Standpoint of Science 59

mankind to higher intellectual and physical
efficiency. It is idle to condemn it ; we can
only see that it exists and recognise what
we have gained by it — civilization and social
sympathy. But while the statesman has to
watch this external struggle, to see that the
nation is really an organized whole, not a
loose agglomeration of hostile groups of men
seeking primarily their own profit and pleasure
at the national expense ; while he has to
check the internal struggle of man with man,
he must be very cautious that the nation is
not silently rotting at its core. He must
insure that the fertility of the inferior stocks
is checked, and that of the superior stocks
encouraged ; he must regard with suspicion
anything that tempts the physically and
mentally fitter men and women to remain
childless. He must see to it that a reserve
of brain and muscle is pushed down into
occupations that have little apparent need
of them, or forced into new lands — even at
the expense of inferior races — for upon this
reserve we shall surely have to fall back in
times of crisis— and such crises will come in
our lifetime, to judge by economic and

6o National Life

political history, which may far surpass in
magnitude that of this year. Shortly, the
statesman has to hold the balance between
the strong social feelings upon which are
based the external success of the nation
and the crude natural check to the unlimited
multiplication of the unfit upon which the
internal soundness of the nation depends.
That is the great lesson we must learn from
natural selection and the law of inheritance
as applied to human communities.

I have endeavoured to place before you
a few of the problems which, it seems to me,
arise from a consideration of some of our
recent difficulties in war and in trade. Science
is not a dogma ; it has no infallible popes to
pronounce authoritatively what its teaching
is. I can only say how it seems to one in-
dividual scientific worker that the doctrine
of evolution applies to the history of nations.
My interpretation may be wrong, but of the
true method I am sure : a community of
men is as subject as a community of ants or
as a herd of buffaloes to the laws which rule
all organic nature. We cannot escape from
them ; it serves no purpose to protest at what

from the Standpoint of Science 6i

some term their cruelty and their bloodthirsti-
ness. We can only study these laws, recognise
what of gain they have brought to man, and
urge the statesman and the thinker to regard
and use them, as the engineer and inventor
regard and then turn to human profit the
equally unchangeable laws of physical nature.
The origin of the world and the purport
of life are mysteries alike to the poet, the
theologian, and the man of science. One
who has stood somewhat as the mediator
between the three admitted the mystery,
saw the cruelty of natural processes when
judged from the relative standpoint of man,
but found therein an undefinable * tendency
towards righteousness.' If by righteousness
he meant wider human sympathies, intenser
social instincts, keener pity, and clearer prin-
ciples of conduct, then I believe that ten-
dency, that continual progress of mankind,
is the scarcely recognised outcome of the
bitter struggle of race with race, the result
of man, like all other life, being subject to
the stern law of the survival of the fitter, to
the victory of the physically and mentally
better organized. Mankind as a whole, like

62 National Life

the individual man, advances through pain
and suffering only. The path of progress
is strewn with the wreck of nations ; traces
are everywhere to be seen of the hecatombs
of inferior races, and of victims who found
not the narrow way to the greater perfection.
Yet these dead peoples are, in very truth,
the stepping-stones on which mankind has
arisen to the higher intellectual and deeper
emotional life of to-day.

THE END

*^^V 2 1915

ntUNO AMD tOMt, LTD., PRINTBRS, GUILDFOKD

Denty Svo., Cloth, With 33 IllustraHms, Price 7S. 6d. net,

THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE

Second Edition^ thoroughly Revised and much Enlarged,
By KARL PEARSON, M.A., F.R.S.,

PROFESSOR OP APPLIED MATHEMATICS AND MECHANICS IN UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE, LONDON.

Contains two entirely New Chapters on Natural Selection and Heredity,
embracing a popular account of Professor Pearson's own more
recent work in this direction.

SCOPE OF THE BOOK.

This work attempts to give a philosophical basis to the fundamental principles of
modem science. It assumes no special mathematical or biol<^cal training on the
part of the reader, but endeavours to lay before the man with average education an
intelligible account of what science professes to achieve and of what it does not. The
first four chapters define the material and lay down the principles of all scientific
reasoning ; they explain the scope, methods, and hqpes of science and its relation to
our theory of life. The following four chapters discuss the axioms and principles of
physical science, and endeavour to give a rational view of mechanism which is not
open to the criticisms raised against it by Balfour, Ward, and other recent meta-
physical writers. The next three chapters deal with the science of organic forms,
discussing the principal factors of evolution and endeavouring to give them exact
quantitative definition. The two chapters on evolution place before the reader the
present position of the Darwinian theory, at the same time indicating the futility of
recent reactionary attacks. The final chaffer deals with the classification of the
sciences, and gives a bird's-eye ^ew of the fields wherein the specialist alone can
work.

PRESS NOTICES.

* Not the least interesting part of this powerful book is the discussion of the effect
on the mind of a true scientific education, which enables a man or woman to form
judgments freed from individual bias. . . . We recommend all readers, and especially
scientists, metaphysicians, theologians, and last, but not least, the writeis of scientific
text-books, to read and digest this well-written, clearly-reasoned description of what
science and scientific method is,*— Pall Mall Gazette,

' . . . We have been again and again impressed in examining " The Grammar "
with the remarkable lucidity of Professor Pearson's explanations.'— AVr^u/^d^.

' It b still a grammar in that it deals with the foundations of science ; but a far
more ambitious title might have been fgiven to so comprehensive a work.'— T'Atf
Bookman.

A. & C BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, LONDON